WWE RAW, Hannah Montana and Northern Lights lead cable show rankings

WWE Raw cleared five million viewers in both hours  and took the top two spots in the weekly charts.  Next up was Hannah Montana with 4.538 million.  The fourth spot went to Lifetime's movie Northern Lights, the first of a series of movies based on Nora Roberts' books that Lifetime will air that averaged 4.531 million, Lifetime's most-watched movie so far this year.

Save for an airing of iCarly at number fourteen, the rest of this week's top twenty was made up entirely of SpongeBob and NCIS airings.  SpongeBob grabbed eight of the top twenty spots, and NCIS took seven.

The finale of Battlestar Galactica averaged 2.364 million viewers.  If you want to know how it did with middle aged men like us, more information is here via NBC press release.

In other finale news, the series finale of Kyle XY averaged 1.662 million.  Trust Me looks to be burning off episodes airing two new episodes last Tuesday, but interestingly a repeat the next night at 11pm did better (it was the only one of the three to clear 600,000!).   It looks like Trust Me is bumped for NBA Basketball tonight, but will air two new episodes between 9p-11p on 3/31.

Damages on FX remains damaged from a ratings perspective, averaging only 632,000.  I don't think it's quite as good as many of the digerati, but I have enjoyed the second season and am surprised the numbers aren't a bit better.

Back in the old days (like three weeks ago) there was some special magic for That's So Raven at midnight on Friday night/Saturday morning, but Disney took that time slot away from Raven and some of the magic is gone.  Last week, some show called Life With Derek had the spot, and while it did not clear 2 million viewers as Raven routinely did, at 1.978 million it did best Raven's best for the week, 1.605 million on a Wednesday at 6:30pm.   Bring back the midnight magic!

Update: The Big Love season finale on Sunday night averaged 2.7 million for HBO while the season (series?) finale of Flight of Conchords averaged 678,000.  Eastbound & Down averaged 904,000 viewers.

Top 20 cable shows for the week ending March 22, 2009:

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Please note, all shows outside of the top twenty are sorted by viewers but ARE NOT ranked. If you don't see a show listed here, the only thing you can conclude for sure is that it wasn't in the top twenty.   The top twenty would include premium cable, if any of those shows ever made the top twenty.  But the additional show list is for advertising supported basic cable networks only. We do not see data directly for premium cable channels.  I don't KNOW how Big Love or United States Of Tara did, but if I see anything I'll post it here and if you see anything, please post a link in the comments.

There are over 14,000 shows. I'm not taking requests as it would be impossible to please everyone. Sorry!  If you make a request in the comments anyway, I will ignore it, sorry.

Nielsen Ratings Data: ©2009 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved

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